for place and pension, or fluttered in levity and sin, in the
antechambers of the later Stuarts, been asked, who of all the
writers of the times were likely to go down to posterity among the
lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous would have been his
apportionments of fame. Pepys might, from the Puritan education of
his boyhood, have named Owen, Bates, and Baxter; or from the
Conformist associations of his later years, have selected South, or
Patrick, or Tillotson, as the religious writers who had surpassed
all rivalry, or named a Walton or Castell, as having taken bonds of
fame for the perpetuity of their influence. Had he known of
Clarendon's preparations to become the historian of the Commonwealth
and Restoration, or of Burnet's habits of preserving memoirs of the
incidents and characters around him, he might have conjectured their
probable honors in after-times. But in poetry he would have classed
Dryden the royalist far above Milton the republican apologist of
regicide; and might, aping the fashions of the palace, have
preferred to either the author of Hudibras together with the lewd
playwrights who were the delight of a shameless court--hailing the
last as the most promising candidates for posthumous celebrity. How
little could he have dreamed that among these Puritans and
Non-conformists, whose unpopular cause he had himself deserted, and
whom his royal masters Charles and James had betrayed, amerced,
exiled, and incarcerated; in those conventicles so closely watched
and so sternly visited, which these persecuted confessors yet by
stealth maintained; aye, and in those dungeons, whither the informer
so often from these conventicles dragged them, British freedom had
its truest guardians, and British literature some of its noblest
illustrations. How little thought he that God had there, in his old
and glorious school of trial, his "hidden ones," like Bunyan, whose
serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious over wrong and